Marauders went on a tear this season

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This article was published 07/08/2018 (2937 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The 13 members of the North Winnipeg Marauders AA U11 baseball team were just one win away from being provincial champs.

After a remarkable 35 straight wins, the boys ended their season feeling good about themselves, even after losing last month to a team from Winkler, Man., at the provincial tournament in Morden.

“It was quite an incredible year,” coach Chris Mussell said of the city championship-winning team.

“We had a really good group of players all around. We had really good pitching, strong hitting, and strong defence.”

The Marauders started practising in the middle of April and were on the field an average of five days a week. Mussell said his players were extremely committed to the sport, even those who were still playing hockey or soccer at the beginning of the season.

It was that commitment that brought such success to the team, Mussell added. 

“They are really good athletes who are really good at baseball and committed to it. It’s a short season, it’s only maybe three or so months long, but they are very committed, so it was great to go out and practise. It was a great group to be around.”

Half of the team was made up of returning players while the other half were new. However, the returning players became mentors to those who were just coming in, and pitcher Logan Bruneau said the new players also showed them a few new tricks.

“We all worked hard, and our coaches helped us, and we succeeded well,” the 11-year-old said. “(Baseball) is an active sport and you work with your team.

“Everybody got along and when someone got out or made a bad play our team picked him up.”

Mussell said the Marauders had such a great year that team’s coaches had to work hard to keep them going. In return, he said the players did an excellent job at not becoming over-confident, even when they sometimes didn’t understand why their coaches were still asking them to do better.

“Because we won so many games in a row one of the challenges was just keeping the boys motivated and to realize that ‘You have to play hard, you have to keep getting better and keep improving. Even if you win game after game, you still have to come out to practice and play hard so that you keep getting better,’” Mussell said. “And I think the boys were really focused on that, they just wanted to be better baseball players.” 

The Marauders ended the season celebrating their city championship title as well as a record of 35 wins, one tie and one loss.

“This is a really good group, really fun to being around, good boys, good parents, good coaches, even the siblings that were out at practices and games,” Mussell said. 

“We hope that we got some guys that want to stick with baseball going forward.”